Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Israel Contract

Two Google workers have resigned and another was fired over a project providing AI and cloud services to the Israeli government and military

TIME

In midtown Manhattan on March 4, Google’s managing director for Israel, Barak Regev, was addressing a conference promoting the Israeli tech industry when a member of the audience stood up in protest. “I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance,” shouted the protester, wearing an orange t-shirt emblazoned with a white Google logo. “No tech for apartheid!” The Google worker, a 23-year-old software engineer named Eddie Hatfield, was booed by the audience and quickly bundled out of the room, a video of the event shows. After a pause, Regev addressed the act of protest. “One of the privileges of working in a company which represents democratic values is giving space for different opinions,” he told the crowd. Three days later, Google fired Hatfield. Hatfield is part of a growing movement inside Google that is calling on the company to drop Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel, jointly held with Amazon. The protest group, called No Tech for Apartheid, now has around 40 Google employees closely involved in organizing, according to members, who say there are hundreds more workers sympathetic to their goals.

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We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war | Alex de Waal

Gaza’s health crisis has its own dreadful momentum. Even if the shooting ends today and the aid trucks begin to roll, the dying will carry o

the Guardian

Gaza is already the most intense starvation catastrophe of recent decades. The death toll from hunger and disease may soon surpass the body count from bombs and bullets. The Famine Review Committee reported this week that Gaza is facing “imminent famine”. The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, set up 20 years ago, provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises. Its figures for Gaza are the worst ever by any metric. It estimates that 677,000 people, or 32% of all Gazans, are in “catastrophic” conditions today and a further 41% are in “emergency” conditions. It expects fully half of Gazans, more than 1 million people, to be in “catastrophe” or “famine” within weeks. A parallel report from the Famine Early Warning System Network of the US Agency for International Development sounds the same alarm. It is the clearest warning that the network has given at any time in its 40-year history. A rule of thumb is that “catastrophe” or “famine” conditions mean a daily death rate from from hunger or disease of two people out of 10,000. About half are children under five years old. The arithmetic is simple. For a population of 1 million, that is 200 deaths per day, 6,000 per month.

London’s Biggest Eurovision Song Contest Screening Party Canceled Due to Israel’s Participation

A London screening party for the Eurovision Song Contest finals has been canceled, the organizers have said.

Variety

London’s biggest screening party for the Eurovision Song Contest finals has been canceled, the venue Rio Cinema and organizer Eurovision Party London have said. “Following discussion with the organizers of Eurovision Party London, we have collectively decided not to screen the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest this year while Israel remains in the competition,” the Rio Cinema said in a statement on X. “The Eurovision Party London has been a beloved partner of The Rio Cinema for many years, and we will continue to work with them in the future. We firmly believe that the Eurovision Song Contest has the power to bring people together across the world, and when its core values of inclusivity, equality and universality are upheld, it can be a genuine force for good. With its own slogan in mind, we hope that we can all be United By Music again soon. We will continue to organize fundraising events for the charities we support, including Doctors Without Borders and Medical Aid for Palestine.”

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Palestine Action ruined a 1914 painting by Philip Alexius de László inside Trinity College, University of Cambridge of Lord Arthur James Balfour – the colonial administrator and signatory of the Balfour Declaration [1]. An activist slashed the homage and sprayed the artwork with red paint, symbolising the bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917.  Arthur Balfour, then UK Foreign secretary, issued a declaration which promised to build “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, where the majority of the indigenous population were not Jewish [2]. He gave away the Palestinians homeland — a land that wasn’t his to give away.   After the Declaration, until 1948, the British burnt down indigenous villages to prepare the way; with this came arbitrary killings, arrests, torture, sexual violence including rape against women and men, the use of human shields and the introduction of home demolitions as collective punishment to repress Palestinian resistance [3] [4]. The British were initiating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, fulfilling the Zionist aim to build their ‘home’ over the top of what were Palestinian communities, towns, villages, farms and ancestral land, rich in heritage, culture and ancient archeological history [5]. The Palestinians refer to this time as the Nakba — which translates into the great catastrophe. In 1948, the Zionist militia, trained by the British, forced over 750,000 Palestinians into exile, destroyed over 500 villages and forced those who remained to live under a brutal reign of occupation [6].

Palestine Action slash painting of Lord Balfour in the University of Cambridge

Images and videos are available for free here Palestine Action ruined a 1914 painting by Philip Alexius de László inside Trinity College, Un

Palestine Action

‘Cold-blooded massacre’: Israeli forces kill over 104 aid seekers in Gaza

Over 100 killed and 750 wounded after Israeli forces fired at Palestinians collecting food aid in Gaza City.

Al Jazeera

More than 100 Palestinians have been killed and some 700 others wounded after Israeli troops opened fire on hundreds waiting for food aid southwest of Gaza City, health officials say, as the besieged enclave faces an unprecedented hunger crisis. The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Thursday that at least 104 people were killed and more than 750 wounded, with the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemning what it said was a cold-blooded “massacre”. [...] People had congregated at al-Rashid Street, where aid trucks carrying flour were believed to be on the way. Al Jazeera verified footage showing the bodies of dozens of killed and wounded Palestinians being carried onto trucks as no ambulances could reach the area. “We went to get flour. The Israeli army shot at us. There are many martyrs on the ground and until this moment we are withdrawing them. There is no first aid,” said one witness. Reporting from the scene, Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul said that after opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies. “It is a massacre, on top of the starvation threatening citizens in Gaza,” he said. The dead and wounded had been taken to four medical centres: al-Shifa, Kamal Adwan, Ahli and the Jordanian hospitals. Ambulances could not reach the area as the roads had been “totally destroyed”, said al-Ghoul. “The numbers will rise. Hospitals are no longer able to accommodate the huge number of patients because they lack fuel, let alone medicine. Hospitals have also run out of blood.” Reporting from occupied East Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said the Israeli military “initially tried to pin the blame on the crowd” saying that dozens were hurt as a consequence of being crushed and trampled when aid trucks arrived. “And then, after some pushing the Israelis went on to say that their troops felt threatened, that hundreds of troops approached their troops in a way they posed a threat to them so they responded by opening fire,” Smith added.

Video transcript:

Did you know that Native Americans were directly mentioned by one of the founding fathers of zionism? In his 1923 essay* The Iron Wall, Ze'ev Jabotinsky argued that the only way to successfully colonize Palestine was through brute military force. He referenced what happened to indigenous people here in the americas as an example. He writes, “my readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries.

“The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not.

“the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

“This is equality true of the arabs.

“We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.”

The one thing I wanna point out is that in 1923, one of the founding fathers of zionism is labeling himself and the project of Israel as colonizers. He is referring to Palestinians as the natives of the area, comparing them to the indigenous people of the Americas. He also is glorifying the pilgrim fathers of the Americas, painting them as absolute saints and basically applauding how effectively they were able to slaughter and murder us and steal our land. So I genuinely want to know how is a movement going to go from applauding and fawning over our murderers to suddenly wanting to steal our identities and claim indigeneity to the area in order to more effectively carry out the same levels of violence and genocide that happened here. Unfortunately for them Palestinians and Native Americans are similar in many ways, including our resilience and our fighting spirit. Despite every genocidal act that the ‘wholesome’ pilgrim fathers committed over the past 500 years; natives are still here, our languages are still here, our cultures are still here, we still have our identity and if we can survive that long of fierce brutal colonisation, I know that Palestinians will do the same. I highly encourage all of you to look up the essay The Iron Wall, thoroughly read it so you can fully understand how deep this history goes and you can see the parallels for what they truly are: blatantly obvious. And to my fellow natives on here, educate yourself on this so that you can educate your family, your friends, your tribal leadership. We need to boldly and loudly push back against this weaponization and bastardization of what it means to be indigenous, especially with the opening of the “indigenous embassy” in Jerusalem on February 4th. The embassy’s goal is to quote “change anti-israel narrative among native peoples.” They’re realizing that indigenous solidarity with Palestine worldwide is becoming a problem, and they’re trying so hard to undermine that. Do not let them appeal to and use our own people in order to do that because as Ze'ev Jabotinsky himself said, the Palestinian struggle and the Native American struggle are parallel and intertwined. And it doesn’t matter how many embassies are opened, how many bribes are given, how much propaganda is spewed. You can not erase that bond between Palestinians and indigenous people.

Transcript end.